Cell Phone Hub

Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Misc. Gadgets, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Household, Portable Audio

Welcome back to The Pipeline, a weekly feature where we dig through the mainstream media and see what the pundits, prognosticators and and pencil pushers have been discussing over the past week.

This week, the media was all over Nintendo's announcement that the gaming console formerly codenamed Revolution would henceforth be known as Wii. And, not surprisingly, most of the mainstream journos covering the story concurred with our assessment that the name somehow isn't going to wiin Niintendo any kudos. "Is Nintendo being desperately silly to attract attention, or is it just desperately short of clue?" asked the Guardian, while the Financial Times headlined its article "Wii aren't too sure about this." However, Nintendo did have at least one defender, Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, who pointed out that "N-Gage and Gizmondo are cool names" that didn't help those products win many fans. "Consumers relate to the coolness of the product, not the name." Wii'll see, Michael, Wii'll see.

Of course, the Wii announcement wasn't the only story in the news this week, and the mainstream press managed to crank out a few other interesting nuggets. USA Today took a look at the Pioneer Inno, and declared it "a winner," while The New York Times looked at the growing number of home docking systems for cellphones. Meanwhile, Forbes looked at another way to use cellphones at home, checking out the market for UMA-enabled handsets. Our favorite media hit this week, though, came from the Washington Post, which took an in-depth look at the DDR-as-exercise phenom, with the paper's reporter declaring, "Hello, my name is Caroline, and I'm addicted to 'Dance Dance Revolution.'" Hey, at least she's not addicted to the Wii.

• Nintendo goes Wii ... (not a typo)
• Guardian - Nintendo Wii is twee
• Financial Times - Wii aren't too sure about this
• BBC - Nintendo name swap sparks satire
• Seattle PI - Wii is for everyone
• AP - Nintendo names new video game console
• USA Today - Look out iPod, Inno marries satellite radio, portable music
• The New York Times - A cellphone in park, even more powerful
• Forbes - Double-duty phones
• The Washington Post - Get a move on

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Alright Q fans, we've got some good news for you. We've received word that Verizon and Motorola are holding a joint news conference in New York this May 22nd -- no, not May 22nd 2007, though we should qualify that -- to announce the Q. We know, wipe the look of shock off your face; we don't really have much more info to give you than that, but really, what more do you need? By this point you're either completely sick of hearing about this thing, or have some insane pent up urge to get one, so for the latter crowd: keep your eyes and ears tuned to May 22nd.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

IXI Mobile has made good on its MacArthur-like promise to return to the mobile messaging arena, with the launch of the CT-17 in Germany. As previously reported, the handheld will be selling for about $60, with monthly plans, marketed through 1&1 as the Pocket Web service, starting at about $12. Unlike IXI's original effort, the text-centric AT&T Ogo (which IXI still markets in some countries), the CT-17 has broad support for a range of services, including web access and voice features (via an external headset). Voice and web functions were among the reasons for the original Ogo's failure to catch on (that and the fact that AT&T sort of lost interest in it amid the company's acquisition by Cingular). PocketWeb is being positioned as a lower-cost competitor to products like the Sidekick and BlackBerry, and with the new features and attractive pricing, the Ogo may just be a go this time around.

[Thanks, Jerry]

Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Laptops, Podcasts, Portable Audio

Just because we had to take a week off to perform certain civic duties doesn't mean the news stops,. So we're back this week with the latest on Motorolas new Canary phone (which could well be the followup to the RAZR), the Sidekick III showing up on the FCC, Apple's new spensivo 17-inch MacBook Pro, whatever it is AT&T is doing to fight their own battle for the digital living room, and the Venzero One portable audio player. Enjoy!

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01:54 - Motorola RAZR 2 / Canary?
04:40 - Sidekick III hits the FCC
08:11 - Apple unveils the 17-inch MacBook Pro
11:30 - Venzero announces the Venzero One
18:14 - AT&T to launch Homezone TV service
22:47 - Listener voicemail / e-mail

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Mobile telephones have progressed a long way from their humble beginnings as the analog “bricks” of the 80’s as technology has offered increasingly more complex features and options. Once no more than just a phone, now the average new cellphone has more on-board processing power than the combined computing power used to land men on the moon. Miniaturization, modern programming, and constantly improving technology driven on by a hungry market means that the cellphones of today are not just a phone, or even an organizer, but instead, they are a centralized multimedia platform. They offer many of the same advanced features as a PDA, like Bluetooth, flash card compatibility, radio, and fully featured integrated digital cameras. Much like the cameras found on PDAs, the digital photography offered by multimedia phones is not brilliant, but rather better suited to casual photography of friends at opportune moments. The advantage of having an integrated cell-camera is that as a phone is something that people tend to always carry with them, they will always have a camera handy.

If high quality digital photography is what you’re after, then you’re better off buying a mobile phone and camera separately. While camera technology is getting there for things like PDAs and mobiles, the range of advanced options for a cell phone camera don’t even translate to the standard set of features for a basic digital camera. A comparison of some prominent models on the market today follows, giving consideration to the cost, feature set, and level of quality offered by each device.

The Palm Treo 650 Smartphone runs the Palm OS version 5.4 on a 312MHz Intel CPU. It has 23MB of user memory available, expandable with the addition of either an SD or MMC flash cards. The display is a 320×320 pixel 16-bit color TFT, and it features a 0.3MP digital camera, capable of taking photos or capturing video. Feature wise, it’s impressive, but doesn’t weigh up against similar products for the price. The camera in particular is under-powered for the amount of processing behind it. A Smartphone 650 will set you back about $550.

The Sony Ericsson W800i has 32MB of user memory, and comes free with a 512MB Memory Stick Pro flash card. Featuring a display resolution of 176×220 pixels, and a 2 MP digital camera, it is fairly light on the features, and would be best described as a basic high-end mobile phone. The 2MP digital camera goes some way towards justifying the cost, but it doesn’t compare to buying a digital camera separately. The W800i will set you back around $480.

The Nokia 7610 is a competitive entry on this list, featuring a fairly rich feature set by comparison to the other examples. However, it has only 8MB on-board memory, expandable via a MultiMediaCard flash card. It comes with a free 64MB MMC, with a 176×208 display in 16-bit color. The 1MP digital camera supports a very wide range of image formats, as well as two modes of video in low or medium resolution. It supports multiple video formats, has a 4x digital zoom. The Bluetooth enabled system itself has a web browser and email client. The main problems with this phone are the relatively short lived battery, and the small amount of on-board memory. But at just $310, the feature set gives this phone serious bang for the buck.

If we compare each of these to a normal digital camera, it is easy to see why they are not a good choice if you intend to focus on photography. $350 gets you a Canon SD500 7.1 MP digital camera. It features 3x optical zoom, along with 4x digital zoom, Television AV/out port, proper strobe flash with red-eye reduction, heavily customizable setup, optional automatic lighting conditions compensation, a tripod mount point, full motion video recorded at effective resolution of 0.3MP. It has an SD card slot, and a host of other features too numerous to name. This is not an elite, professional grade camera, however it outperforms every camera phone listed by at least 3:1. and at a lower cost too.

Cellphones have evolved to a point where they more closely resemble a laptop than anything else, combining a truly impressive range of multimedia technologies into one tiny device. Displays are improving rapidly, as is the level of functionality offered by modern mobile phones. As they become more numerous, these features will become increasingly useful as vast networks of people, all armed with such versatile devices will begin to take shape. As of now, however, they are fairly unfocused in their capabilities, offering a very wide range of features, but not delivering any one of them so well as to replace the technology from which the features first came from. While camera cellphones can have their uses, they still do not lend themselves well to high quality photography. For casual use with friends, or general purpose use, a camera phone can be a lot of fun, and while it combines a lot of devices into one convenient package, it doesn’t deliver the a high level of quality.

About the Author
Ron Donnelly is the editor of the digital camera site, buying-guide-for-digital-cameras. You can visit the site at http://www.buying-guide-for-digital-cameras.com

technorati tags: cellphones, cell phones, camera cellphones, digital cameras.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets

Qool's had a few arbitrary devices over the years, but we definitely had to look twice at their SkyQube and SkyQube². It's apparently still early on in development, but the box gives you calling every which way possible, often using Skype as a call conduit: USB to PC audio / Skype, Skype to POTS forwarding, Skype to (integrated) GSM forwarding, Skype to Skype, SkypeOut, Skype messaging to SMS, followme to/from Skype -- all of which you use with your POTS telephone. It's also got conference calling and integrated contacts, just one giant Skype love-in, supposedly to go for $80 for the SkyQube and $150 for the SkyQube². We're just not ready for that much Skype though, man, you know?

Filed under: Cellphones

Filed under: Cellphones

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Transportation

We like, totally forgot to register for the event of the year: the Airline Interior Expo Hamburg. Thankfully CNET's got some pictorial highlights of what it'll be like flying in the future; expect to see some serious tech on the 300 passenger superliner Airbus a350, like LED mood lighting, skyscape projectors, and an "infinity dome"; OnAir, an Airbus subsidiary, showed off their on-board GSM mini-cell (which will be rolled out on Air France in 2007); Digecor had their DigeplayerXT PMP with WiFi, 8-inch screen, 60GB drive, and credit card reader (of course); and our fav was the Contour "Solar" bed / seat / mobile office (pictured) with full entertainment system, power for your bag of devices, and massage feature. Suddenly killing hours in a highly pressurized frigid cabin miles above the Earth's surface seems kind of enticing. Kind of.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

As soon as a Sharp-made handset shows up on the FCC with a whole bunch of confidentiality-request paperwork affixed, you know it's gonna be good. Sidekick fans, feast your eyes on the real deal up in the grill (yep, all those pics were legit), and the um, naked, battery-less tail end of the Sidekick III (model PV200). Can't be long now, can it? And yes, this confirms pretty much much of the info we'd already heard about the forthcoming device: 1.3 megapixel camera, expandable memory (miniSD), and Bluetooth.